McCain To Media: It’s My Party And I’ll Lie If I Want To
by tristero
[Thanks for all your kind words about The Origin. I’ll post more soon but now it’s back to your regularly scheduled bizarro-world reports. ]
In case you missed this, a conservative actually spoke the truth:
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to the Politico about the increased media scrutiny of the campaign’s factual claims: “We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”
Only a pedant would interpret that as saying something other than, “We’re gonna lie our heads off if we think it’ll help us win ’cause that’s all that matters. And you can’t stop us.”
If we had a working political press corps, instead of the mediocrities, liars, suck-ups, and fools we actually do have, then they would feel no compulsion to repeat McCain’s lies, except to debunk them, as in:
“There they go again. Adding to their already long list of lies, patently untrue assertions, and gross distortions, the McCain campaign said today…”
But if it makes you feel better, Obama raised $66 million, McCain only $47 million! Wowee Zowee! That really sounds like something until you realize that having an entire tv station flacking the latest McCain/Bush/Palin iies is easily worth an extra double $19 million.
But let’s give Obama credit. He has run a campaign so basically honorable and decent he has done his mother proud. And that is truly moving, even inspiring. Unfortunately, every other Democrat has decided to do likewise or go missing (where is Clinton? She should have been all over the Sunday bloviations).
That’s not to say Democrats should start lying like McCain and Bush/Palin. There are plenty of ways to fight. Need an idea? Digby has a great one: confront the disaster that is conservatism head on, no punches pulled.
I don’t use the old saw “imagine if this were a Democrat” anymore because it’s implicit in just about everything the Republicans do these days. But this is really too much. We heard constant hand wringing from the press during the primaries about the horrors of having Bill Clinton anywhere near the White house should the harpy Clinton win the election. Or Obama, with Clinton as his VP, for that matter. People have been rending their garments for months over the possibility that a successful ex-president might be hanging around the white house giving advice. (Of course, when Bush ran, the implicit — if unfulfilled — promise that Poppy would be around gave the same people confidence that the callow, unqualified Junior would have sage guidance.) Even Rudy Giuliani was soundly spanked for suggesting that his wife might sit in on cabinet meetings.
But here we have the underqualified Governor of Alaska empowering her even more undqualified husband, whose main claim to fame in life is being a snow machine racer, to be an intrinsic part of her executive team:
In voting to issue a subpoena to Todd Palin in an investigation of the firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, state lawmakers on Friday signaled that Mr. Palin, the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, might have played a central role in one of the most contentious episodes of her governorship.
While that suggestion goes beyond the image presented of Mr. Palin during the Republican convention as a blue-collar family man and sportsman, it echoes a widely held understanding among lawmakers, state employees and lobbyists about Mr. Palin’s heavy engagement in state government.
In the small circle of advisers close to the governor, these people say, Mr. Palin is among the closest, and he plays an unpaid but central role in many aspects of the administration of Ms. Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president.
Mr. Palin’s involvement in the governor’s office has prompted an irreverent quip by some capital staff members when decisions are to be made that might affect the governor: “What would Todd do?”
It goes on to outline many instances of Palin’s involvement or attendance at meetings, usually sitting quietly in a corner saying little … like Dick Cheney.
If Todd Palin played a large role in Palin’s administration people have a right to hear from him about it. Hillary’s professional life was a major concern in the 1992 election and Michelle Obama’s speeches have been parsed almost as closely as her husband’s. It would be one thing if he was uninvolved in his wife’s business, like Howard Dean’s wife was. But any spouse who is involved in his or her spouse’s administration simply has to submit himself to questioning.
This week, non-partisan fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have called Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) out for lies in his attack ads against Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). But on Fox News Sunday today, former Bush political adviser Karl Rove dismissed the organizations, claiming that “they’ve got their own biases built in there.” “You can’t trust the fact-check organizations,” said Rove.
You know, FactCheck.org does have some problems on occasion (Politifact, on the other hand, is great). But that’s not really the point. Rove’s job, and by extension McCain’s job, is to basically nuke reality and leave everything open to question. In a world where there is an objective reality, Republicans can’t function and certainly can’t run their electoral strategy. They need two things – ignorance and an unknowable truth. That’s been true since well before the Mayberry Machiavellis arrived in Washington and will be true long after they leave.
And so Sarah Palin’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine is OK, because most Americans don’t know what it means either. In fact, the less knowledge a world leader has, the better, because they can’t be muddled up with all those facts about how occupied countries historically resist occupation or how countries become interdependent or which country wields power over their sphere of influence, or such related nonsense. Candidates who have little interest in foreign affairs are “authentic” and the kind of reg’lar folks we need to rule with their gut-level belief. The fact that Sarah Palin, for example, is a real person in an unreal situation is a net good. Putting her a heartbeat away from the Presidency is of no consequence.
I have to agree with this assessment from Bradrocket:
The GOP has become one giant St00p1d Machine. They revel in being ignorant about everything, and anyone who actually has knowledge about a given topic is treated at best as suspect. The fact that Sarah Palin has, at least for the moment, been a boon to McCain’s campaign is the dark reflection of a nation that has lost its ability to think. American popular culture has done to us in 50 years what centuries of drinking lead-poisoned water did to the Romans. If you ever wanted evidence that the United States is in its official decline period, Sarah Palin is it.
With a caveat: there is a difference between a country’s citizens being stupid and being ignorant. IMO the United States is the latter, and actually it’s worse than that. One party has recognized that you can easily confuse the public by throwing mud at facts and reality and making the truth suspect. That has the practical effect of making people stupid, but in actuality they are ignorant because of this parallel reality that the cynical GOP leadership has created.
And I think the Obama campaign is right to call this dishonorable. McCain and his minions know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t believe their own bullshit. They know that their victory strategy is closely tied to denying reality.
The reviews are in on McCain’s strategy of distorting, distracting and outright lying to the American people and what that says about his character, but the St. Petersburg Times put it best when they said his “campaign of lies disgraces McCain” and “McCain’s straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak. It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity.”
I think turning this into a character attack is the only way to stop it.
…I should note that even Rove said that McCain went a bit too far in some of his ads this week about Obama. That’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel when Rove is critiquing your fact pattern.
Note: This is not a post about politics. I’ve received many inquiries about my music and, while I’ve been hesitant to talk about it here, I thought some readers might be interested in what I’ve been up to.
After a year and a half of near-daily composing, I have finally finished The Origin, an opera-oratorio inspired by the life and works of Charles Darwin. It was a challenging, and very enjoyable, project and will premiere February 9, 2009 at the State University of New York, Oswego – that’s 3 days before Darwin’s 200th birthday!
The music is scored for Soprano, Baritone, chorus, orchestra, and the wonderful Eastern European female choir, Kitka. In addition, the brilliant filmmaker Bill Morrison – known for his work with Ridge Theater, Michael Gordon, and others – will be creating films and other visuals for the performance.
I’d like to give you a brief introduction to the piece and share some short clips of the music in rough demo form. If you are interested, I’ll describe and post more of the music in subsequent posts,.
The texts used in the Origin are taken entirely from the writings of Charles Darwin – with a brief cameo by his wife, Emma. They were compiled and arranged by poet Catherine Barnett and myself. Most of the words come from The Origin of Species; the so-called “transmutation notebooks;” Darwin’s autobiography; The Voyage of the Beagle; and his letters (you can find a huge selection of Darwin’s writings at this incredible site). My purpose was to celebrate Darwin’s thought and life in music, concentrating specifically on the writing and ideas in The Origin of Species.
I had wanted to do a piece with a scientific subject for a very long time. Many years ago, someone in the New Yorker– very likely Richard Dawkins – noted that while religion had its masterpieces like Bach’s St Matthew Passion, science had no comparable works. That struck me as an amusing, and exciting, challenge. I knew I could never write anything remotely approaching the St. Matthew, but the notion of setting to music a classic scientific text really stuck in my mind. The question was: which one? Galileo’s Starry Messenger? Newton’s Principia (which I had already used in a dance piece)? Einstein’s first paper on relativity?
A few years later, I had a big argument with a close and very smart friend, who argued that “intelligent design” creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science classes. I was so shocked that my friend had been bamboozled that it reawakened my interest in evolution and Darwin. I started to follow closely the social “controversy” – as you know, there is no controversy about the reality of evolution – and have posted many times about the issue.
I can’t remember a time I was not aware of Darwin’s theory – my father, a doctor, had probably explained evolution by natural selection to me by the time I was seven or eight. Then, in high school, I read John T. Scopes’ autobiography, Center of the Storm, and saw Inherit the Wind. I was amazed then, and remain just as amazed now, to learn that anyone could reject or be repelled by this incredibly beautiful, and so obviously correct, theory of life’s diversity. Since then, I’ve remained interested in the science of evolution, reading both pop science books like The Beak of the Finch and, very occasionally, an actual scientific text, such as Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution.
After my friend and I argued – to be frank, I was openly rude and contemptuous, and it damaged the friendship for a while – I started reading about evolution in earnest and decided that somehow I would address the subject in music. I toyed with the idea of addressing creationism directly, but the thought of having to set all those lies and stupidity to music really did not interest me in the slightest. Then I saw the Darwin show at the American Museum of Natural History – it’s now traveling to different cities – and I saw the notebooks Darwin kept. I knew immediately I had to do a piece about the making of the Origin of Species. I had my science subject.
I contacted my friend, conductor Julie Pretzat at SUNY Oswego, who had expressed interest in commissioning a large new piece, and told her my idea (Julie had conducted a fine performance of Voices of Light a few years before). She loved it and contacted Mary Avrakotos, who runs ARTSwego, which presents many exciting arts events for the upstate New York community. She was equally excited and so they applied for, and got, a special New York State Music Fund grant for large interdisciplinary music projects (thank you, Eliott Spitzer!). I asked another friend, philosopher and bete noire of creationists, Barbara Forrest, to be one of my advisers on Darwin. I read everything I could get my hands on. Then, I started to compose. And compose. And compose.
The finished piece is evening-length, 105 minutes long. Before it gets started in earnest, there is a wordless introduction called “Representation of Chaos.” This is one of many “in” jokes and hidden references in the piece. Almost anyone who has sung in a large choir has performed Haydn’s wonderful oratorio “The Creation” which opens with a wordless introduction called …”Representation of Chaos.” Haydn’s “Representation” ends as a singer intones, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And God said, let there be light, and there was LIGHT.” At which point, the orchestra explodes with an overwhelming C major blast, eradicating the chaos and creating order.
I roughly imitate this idea, although my music is completely different from, and, of course, not comparable to Haydn’s masterpiece. Here’s a brief excerpt from the middle of my Representation of Chaos as “performed” by sampled orchestra with a montage of Scott Hurst’s beautiful Galapagos photography (I’ll talk about the technology I use to compose in a future post, perhaps):
That’s about 1/4 of the entire movement. After Representation of Chaos ends, the piece proper begins. Three different kinds of music alternate, which represent three different parts of Darwin’s life.
Kitka, the Eastern European music ensemble, sings Darwin’s autobiographical writings; they are his public persona, his worldly voice. I used this group because it is such a haunting, unusual sound – and I wanted Darwin’s life to have a unique voice. If you are familiar with Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, then you know how beautiful that sound is. The two vocal soloists sing mostly excerpts from Darwin’s notebooks and letters, what I call the Sandwalk music, after the pathway at Darwin’s house which he frequently walked. They represent his efforts to construct a valid theory of evolution. Finally, the chorus mostly sings excerpts from The Origin of Species, ie, the theory fully realized and described.
Here are some excerpts from “Annie’s Memorial,” which is sung, in a live preview performance, by Kitka. Darwin had ten children. His most beloved daughter, Annie, died at the age of ten from a mysterious ailment. Her death is often taken as a turning point in the development of Darwin’s scientific worldview of a universe ruled by impersonal forces, not a benign Creator. A week after she died, Darwin wrote a touching memorial to her and I set several parts of it. You’ll hear part of the opening as well as the second to last section. The montage shows Darwin, his wife Emma, Annie, their home, Darwin’s writing, and the contents of Annie’s memorial box:
My dear Emma My dear, dearest Emma I pray God Fanny’s note may have prepared you She went to her final rest most tranquilly, most sweetly.
Our poor child Annie was born on Gower Street On March Second, Eighteen Forty One. Our poor child Annie expir’d at Malvern At midday on the Twenty Third of April Eighteen Fifty One…
Once when she was very young she exclaimed , ”Oh Mama what should we do if you were to die?” …
I don’t want to make this post too long, so I’ll stop here. If you’re interested, I can post some more music and explain both the techniques and processes behind this score. It was a tremendous pleasure to work with Darwin’s words and ideas. I hope sometime you have a chance to see the entire piece performed, with Bill Morrison’s films.
This week, I wanted to spotlight a pair of lesser-known, under appreciated and previously hard-to-find films noirs from the 1940s that have finally seen the light of day on DVD. Moontide and Road House are two of the latest reissues in the ongoing Fox Film Noir Series, and both happen to feature the woman of my darkest dreams, Ida Lupino.
The British-born Lupino (who left us in 1995 at age 81) was a staple of the classic American noir cycle from the early 40s through the late 50s. Although it wasn’t the only movie genre she worked in during her long career, it’s the one she was born to inhabit. She had a sexy, slinky, waif-like appearance that was intriguingly contrapuntal to her husky voice and tough-as-nails countenance. Whether portraying a victim of fate or a femme fatale, Lupino imbued all of her characters with an authentic, “lived-in” quality that gave her a compelling screen presence. It’s also worth noting her fine work as a writer, director and producer, in an era of filmmaking when few women wore those hats.
Back in 1941, director Archie Mayo (The Petrified Forest, Charley’s Aunt, A Night in Casablanca) faced the unenviable task of stepping in to rescue a 20th Century Fox film project called Moontide, which had been abandoned by the great Fritz Lang not too long after shooting had begun. As one of the pioneering German expressionists, Lang was a key developer of the visual style that eventually morphed into a defining noir “look” (some of his pre-1940s classics like M , The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse and Fury are generally considered seminal proto-noirs). Moontide was also to be the American debut for Frenchman Jean Gabin, already a major star in Europe (Pepe Le Moko , Grand Illusion, La Bete Humaine ). Needless to say, the pressure was on for Mayo to deliver. And “deliver” he did, with this moody and highly stylistic sleeper, ripe for rediscovery.
Gabin stars as Bobo, an itinerate odd-jobber (the type of character Steve Martin might call a “ramblin’ guy”) who blows into a coastal California fishing community with a parasitic sidekick named Tiny (Thomas Mitchell) in tow. Adhering to time-honored longshoreman tradition, Bobo and Tiny make a wharfside pub crawl the first order of business when they hit port. It is quickly established that the handsome, likable and free-spirited Bobo loves to party, as we watch him go merrily careening into an all-night boning and grogging fest. The next morning, Bobo appears to be suffering from a classic blackout, not quite sure why or how he ended up sacked out on an unfamiliar barge, wearing a hat that belongs to a man who has met a mysterious demise sometime during the previous evening. Taking a stroll along the beach in an attempt to clear his head, he happens upon a distraught young woman named Anna (Lupino) who is attempting to drown herself in the surf. Anyone who has screened a noir or two knows what’s coming next. Before we know it, Bobo and Anna are playing house in a cozy love shack (well, bait shop, technically). Of course, there is still that certain unresolved matter of Did He Or Didn’t He, which provides the requisite dramatic tension for the rest of the narrative.
John O’Hara’s screenplay (adapted from Willard Robertson’s novel) borders on trite at times and could have done more damage to the film’s rep, if it had not been for Gabin and Lupino’s formidable charisma, as well as the beautifully atmospheric chiaroscuro photography (by Charles G. Clarke and Lucien Ballard) and assured direction from Mayo. There are several brilliant directorial flourishes; the montage depicting Bobo’s fateful night of revelry is a particular standout. The surreal touches in that sequence were “inspired” by some original sketches submitted on spec by Salvatore Dali, who was slated to contribute art direction, but ended up dropping out for one reason or another. Great supporting performances abound, particularly from a nearly unrecognizable Claude Rains as a paternal waterfront philosopher who could have easily strolled off the pages of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Moontide would make an interesting double bill with Clash by Night, another character-driven “cannery noir” set in a California fishing town milieu.
And now we come to a particularly delicious sleaze-noir from 1948 called Road House (not to be confused with the trashy 1989 Patrick Swayze mullet fest that shares the same title). This was the fourth and final genre pic from director Jean Nugulesco, who had previously helmed The Mask of Dimitrios, Nobody Lives Forever and Johnny Belinda.
Noir icon Richard Widmark stars as the mercurial Jefty Robbins, who owns a road house called (wait for it…) “Jefty’s”. He has hired his longtime pal Pete Morgan (noir beefcake Cornel Wilde) to help with day-to-day management. The fussy, protective Pete feels that his main function is to be the voice of reason and steer the frequently impulsive Jefty away from making potentially reckless business decisions. When Pete is dispatched to the train station to pick up Jefty’s “new equipment” Lily Stevens (Lupino), a hardened chanteuse who starts cracking wise from the moment they meet, he becomes convinced that this is one of Jefty’s potentially reckless business decisions. The tough, self-assured Lily laughs off his attempt to offer up the advance money “for her trouble” and then steer her onto the next train heading back to Chicago. Now, you and I know that these two are obviously destined to rip each other’s clothes off at some point; the fun is in getting there.
Although the setup may give the impression that this is going to be a standard romantic triangle melodrama, the film segues into noir territory from the moment that the Widmark Stare first appears. For those not familiar with the Widmark Stare, it goes thusly:
Suffice it to say-when you see the Widmark Stare, it is very likely that trouble lies ahead. As his character becomes more and more unhinged, Widmark eventually employs all his “greatest hits” (including, of course, The Demented Cackle). His performance builds to an operatic crescendo of sociopathic batshit craziness in the film’s final act that plays like a precursor to Ben Kingsley’s raging, sexual jealously-fueled meltdown in Sexy Beast.
Widmark and Lupino are both in top form here. Wilde is overshadowed a bit, but then again his “boy toy” role isn’t as showy as the others. Celeste Holm is wonderfully droll as one of Jefty’s long-suffering employees. Lupino insisted on doing her own singing in the film; while she was not a technically accomplished crooner, she actually wasn’t half bad in a husky-voiced “song stylist” vein (she really tears it up on “One For My Baby”).
Both films sport excellent DVD transfers and insightful commentary from noir experts.
A conservative political forum on Saturday sold boxes of waffle mix depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a racial stereotype on its front and wearing Arab-like headdress on its top flap.
The product, Obama Waffles, was meant as political satire, said Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss, two writers from Franklin, Tenn., who created the mix and sold it for $10 a box from a booth at the Values Voter Summit sponsored by the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council.
Republican Party stalwarts Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were among speakers at the forum, which officials said drew 2,100 activists from 44 states.
While Obama Waffles takes aim at Obama’s politics by poking fun at his public remarks and positions on issues, it also plays off the image of the classic pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima, which has been widely criticized as a demeaning stereotype. Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly.
Placing Obama in Arab-like headdress recalls the false rumor that he is a follower of Islam, though he is actually a Christian.
There’s nothing new in this. For years they’ve been selling buttons that say “happiness is Hillary’s face on a milk carton” at conservative confabs. Here’s one they were selling at the Texas Republican convention:
Just a few months ago I posted pictures of these fun t-shirts they were selling at CPAC:
And this too …
This is why we get so crazed when they unctuously attack liberals with charges of racism or sexism (or libertinism.) But then, hypocrisy is no longer an operative concept in our post modern conservative world and we’d better learn to adapt to it.
And in case anyone still thinks that “values voters” care about the private lives of conservative politicians, check out the presence of Newt Gingrich as a featured speaker.
From his childhood pastime of blowing up frogs to his time as Governor of Texas signing death warrants, George W. Bush showed a penchant for bloodthirstiness. It continued throughout his presidential years:
Bob Woodward reports [in his new book] that Casey, the president’s commanding general in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, came to believe that Bush did not understand the nature of the Iraq war, that the president focused too much on body counts as a measure of progress.
“Casey had long concluded that one big problem with the war was the president himself,” Woodward writes. “He later told a colleague in private that he had the impression that Bush reflected the ‘radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, “Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you’ll succeed.” ‘ “
Asked about his interest in body counts, Bush told Woodward: “I asked that on occasion to find out whether or not we’re fighting back. Because the perception is that our guys are dying and they’re not. Because we don’t put out numbers. We don’t have a tally. On the other hand, if I’m sitting here watching the casualties come in, I’d at least like to know whether or not our soldiers are fighting.”
He’s always been bloodthirsty. He signed nearly 160 death warrants in Texas without blinking an eye or expressing the slightest moral qualms at the possibility that any of them might have been innocent. He liked to cross off the names of dead terrorists on a list he kept in his desk. He likes violence.
So, does John McCain. So does Sarah Palin. (She even supports aerial wolf hunting, one of the most despicable hunting practices ever devised.) It’s a defining characteristic of modern conservatism. And it’s killing all of us.
My reader JN from Wisconsin writes in with news of the latest vote suppression effort:
The state elections agency is investigating complaints about a massive campaign mailing Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign has directed toward Wisconsin Democrats and other voters.
Each mailing includes at least one copy of the state application for an absentee ballot that has the address of a local clerk and a box for postage printed on the other side.
But in some cases, the incorrect clerk’s address is printed on the application, leading some Democrats to wonder if the Arizona senator’s campaign is deliberately trying to get them to apply for absentee ballots in places where they aren’t eligible to vote.
“They’re trying to knock me off the rolls,” said Democrat Beverly Jambois, of Middleton. “I can’t tell you how upsetting it is to me. This is how you win elections? By disenfranchising other voters?”
Her household received the flier this week addressed to her husband, Robert, a lawyer for the state Department of Transportation. The couple are registered to vote in Middleton, but the absentee ballot application was addressed to the city clerk’s office in Madison.
A McCain campaign spokeswoman said in a statement the mailing mistakes are “certainly not intentional” but she wouldn’t answer questions. The statement also said the mailing went to “potential supporters across the spectrum.”
Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state GOP, said the mailing is not intended to keep people from the polls and that the wrong absentee ballot applications resulted from incorrect information in databases used for the mailing.
“You do the best with the lists you have, and no list is perfect,” Jefferson said. “There is certainly no type of suppression effort going on.”
Jefferson said the mailing was directed to hundreds of thousands of voters.
This is a form of caging and is part of the Republican vote suppression program. You’ll recall that it was featured in the US Attorney scandal, not that anything came of it. Here’s Greg Palast:
Goodling testified that Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin’s “involvement in ‘caging’ voters” in 2004.
Huh?? Tim Griffin? “Caging”???
The perplexed committee members hadn’t a clue and asked no substantive questions about it thereafter. Karl Rove is still smiling…
Here’s what you need to know and the Committee would have discovered, if only they’d asked:
1. ‘Caging’ voters is a crime, a go-to-jail felony.
2. Griffin wasn’t “involved” in the caging, Ms. Goodling. Griffin, Rove’s right-hand man (right-hand claw), was directing the illegal purge and challenge campaign. How do I know? It’s in the email I got. Thanks. And it’s posted below.
3. On December 7, 2006, the ragin’, cagin’ Griffin was named, on Rove’s personal demand, US Attorney for Arkansas. Perpetrator became prosecutor.
The committee was perplexed about Monica’s panicked admission and accusations about the caging list because the US press never covered it. That’s because, as Griffin wrote to Goodling in yet another email (dated February 6 of this year, and also posted below), their caging operation only made the news on BBC London: busted open, Griffin bitched, by that “British reporter,” Greg Palast.
There’s no pride in this. Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet except the USA only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.
And now, not bothering to understand the astonishing revelation in Goodling’s confessional, they are missing the real story behind the firing of the US attorneys. It’s not about removing prosecutors disloyal to Bush, it’s about replacing those who refused to aid the theft of the vote in 2004 with those prepared to burgle it again in 2008.
It’s quite clear that these operations are still going on. Why wouldn’t they be?
If any of you see news items in your local papers like that one above, please send it to me and I’ll post it. It’s tough to do anything about this stuff, but at least we can document it. As Palast notes above, they were thrilled that the US Networks refused to cover these stories and I doubt they will cover them this time. After all, they’ve got pigs and lipstick scandals on their plates and they just don’t have the time to connect these dots.
Update:Here’s more on Wisconsin. And my correspondent also notes that John Fund (who is peddling a book on “voter fraud”) was on Maher last night and claimed that Republicans would be challenging a lot of provisional ballots in battleground states. So — if the election is close it might not be decided immediately — and could be decided by courts. Gosh, I wonder how that would turn out?
Sarah Palin was a high school basketball star back in the 1980s and when asked about the gender issues in this campaign by Charlie Gibson, she said this:
PALIN: I’m lucky to have been brought up in a family where gender has never been an issue. I’m a product of Title 9, also, where we had equality in schools that was just being ushered in with sports and with equal opportunity for education, all of my life.
I’m part of that generation, where that question is kind of irrelevant, because it’s accepted
How nice for her. Many women (and men) had to fight right wing conservatives like her tooth and nail to achieve that acceptance. If it hadn’t been for them she never would have had all those opportunities and she wouldn’t now be in a position to tell other women that they shouldn’t have them. Like so many conservatives before her, she is more than willing to accept the freedoms and rights that liberals fight for and then turn around and deny them to others.
Still, she does seem to admit that women were allowed equal educational opportunities through governmental action so maybe she could have a chat with her running mate who has a zero rating with the American Association of University Women.
Ok, they’re obviously a bunch of commie symps who “promote equity for all women and girls, lifelong education, and positive societal change,” so who cares what they think, right? But since McCain is the man who chose the first female to be on a national Republican ticket, he must be someone who receives a high rating on women’s issues generally, right?
2007Senator McCain supported the interests of the Federally Employed Women10 percent in 2007.2007Based on a point system, with points assigned for actions in support of or in opposition to League of Women Voters‘s position, Senator McCain received a rating of 17.2005-2006Senator McCain supported the interests of the Business and Professional Women USA33 percent in 2005-2006.2005-2006Senator McCain supported the interests of the National Organization for Women13 percent in 2005-2006.
He’s quite the champion of women’s rights.
This is one of the things that is making liberal women crazy about Palin. They recognize that her achievement to become governor of a conservative state and a GOP VP candidate represents the fruits of a couple of generations of feminists who fought for her right to be there. And yet her political principles would have ensured the opposite. I guess when you open doors you can’t guarantee that everyone who walks through them deserves to, but it’s galling nonetheless.
Rebecca Traister, who’s been following the “woman’s story” throughout this campaign, wrote a great article in Salon this week about this odd phenomenon:
I am still perfectly capable of picking out the sexism being leveled against the Alaska governor by the press, her detractors and her own party. Every time someone doubts Palin’s ability to lead and mother simultaneously, or considers her physical appeal as a professional attribute, or calls her a “maverette,” I bristle.
But that’s the easy stuff. The clear-cut stuff. I’m far more torn about the more subtle, complicated ways in which Palin’s gender has me tied in knots.
Perhaps it’s because the ground has shifted so quickly under my feet, leaving me with only a slippery grasp of what the basic vocabulary of my beat — feminism, women’s rights — even means anymore. Some days, it feels like I’m watching the civics filmstrip about how much progress women made on the presidential stage in 2008 burst into flames, acutely aware that in the back of the room, a substitute teacher is threading a new reel into the projector. It has the same message and some of the same signifiers — Glass ceilings broken! Girl Power! — but its meaning has been distorted. Suddenly it’s Rudy Giuliani and Rick Santorum schooling us about pervasive sexism; Hillary Clinton’s 18 million cracks have weakened not only the White House’s glass ceiling, but the wall protecting Roe v. Wade; the potential first female vice president in America’s 200-year history describes her early career as “your average hockey mom” who “never really set out to be involved in public affairs”; and teen pregnancy is no longer an illustrative example for sex educators and contraception distributors but for those who seek to eliminate sex education and contraception.
In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism — a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin’s potential power — means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children’s books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.
In this “Handmaid’s Tale”-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we’re witnessing “a new creation … of the feminist ideal,” the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it’s now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: “put a skirt on.” “I want her watching my kids,” says Deutsch. “I want her laying next to me in bed.”
Bushian epistomological relativism has finally hit the culture wars.
Politically, this is incredibly easy of course. Palin is just another anti-intellectual, hypocritical, right wing freakshow, to whom I react with the same level of shock and disgust as I did when I first saw George W. Bush. Here’s someone who has no more business running for high office than my cat. It’s mind boggling that our system seems to regularly produce such candidates — and that they have such appeal. It makes you question democracy itself. But Palin is riding in on the hopes and aspirations of generations of women and to have the “first” be someone who has been chosen in order that feminism itself could be used as a shield for social conservatism and retrograde policies is almost too much to take.
I always thought the first female president would be a Republican. It’s a Nixon goes to China thing. Only a Republican female could be assured of not being gender-baited by Republicans. But I assumed she would be someone of stature and accomplishment — that they’d demand that much, if only for their own sense of pride. But they have so lowered their standards and bastardized the presidential campaign into a sort of professional wrestling match, that they don’t feel the need to present any candidate of substance.
I suppose that’s a sort of progress. If they could pick George W. Bush, it would have been unfair to expect any more of the first female candidate. Sadly, however, George W. Bush’s failure won’t be held up as an example of why you shouldn’t vote for a man for high office. I’m afraid Sarah Palin will be. Firsts are important.
Yesterday, McCain said this at the “Service” forum in NYC and right afterwards Tweety went nuts on it saying that it was evocative of the “good” 60’s and thin ties before everybody went crazy and grew their hair:
“I think the tone of this whole campaign would have been very different if Sen. Obama had accepted my request for us to appear in town hall meetings all over America, the same way Jack Kennedy and Barry Goldwater had agreed to do so,” McCain said.
The quote actually comes from a 1988 Washington Post interview with Goldwater — and it might be interesting to see the full quote in context.
In it, Goldwater says, “It probably wouldn’t have happened.” Here’s the full quote:
“Goldwater’s eyes remain fixed on the window. ‘I would have enjoyed it very much. I even talked to him one day about using the same airplane, going to the same places. He’d get out in one place and start to debate and I’d rebut him. Then we’d turn it around in the next place. It was the Uncle Morris fantasy, and it probably wouldn’t have happened. But he liked the idea. It would have saved a lot of money, we’d have had a good time, and it would have done the country a lot of good.'” (Washington Post, 8/14/1988)
Tweety said this harkened back to the good old days when the country wasn’t divided and everybody was on the same team. Too bad one of the participants in this good hearted exchange of views was assassinated in cold blood on the streets of Dallas before they could make their “morning in America” tour.
and 
are two of the latest reissues in the ongoing Fox Film Noir Series, and both happen to feature the woman of my darkest dreams, Ida Lupino.
) faced the unenviable task of stepping in to rescue a 20th Century Fox film project called 
and 
). Needless to say, the pressure was on for Mayo to deliver. And “deliver” he did, with this moody and highly stylistic sleeper, ripe for rediscovery.
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(as director/co-writer only),
